[Dr. Vladislav Alexandrovich Kerenski]

The Tupolev laboratory aircraft, no. 3709 vibrated noisily. I could barely hear myself think over the sound of its thrumming engines. The metal seat I occupied was incredibly uncomfortable. Bone-chilling wind cut right through my entire body. Our brilliant engineers build great and powerful machines, the biggest in the world, but for some reason never thought about ergonomics. I wrapped my hands around myself, staring through the frosted-over window at aircraft no. 5800302, which we were following in the air.

Glacier-covered mountains and the view of the distant ocean glimmered far, far below, tiny waves of the Barents Sea breaking against the frozen shores of Nenets. Cloud formations slowly rolled by, beneath and above us.

The large, heavily modified plane moving ahead of us carried the most powerful weapon built by humanity - the Tzar Bomba. The monstrous all-killing device wasn’t 100 megatons as Nikita Khrushchev had promised originally. It was only... fifty megatons. Enough to vaporize any city on the planet ten times over.

The blast wave it would generate would circle the world three times…

I blinked. How did I know this? Did I calculate this ahead of time on Bessie? It was hard to think straight because of all the vibration and noise.

I turned to my eternal companion, commissar Sasha Gradenski. He looked as cheerful as ever, staring ahead with a giddy expression.

“Are you excited to see her?” He said. “The perfect, absolute weapon…”

I nodded, readjusting my goggles.

“Truly, the most beautiful girl if there was one… a masterpiece of Soviet engineering genius beyond compare,” he rambled on.

I bundled up myself further in my leather coat, fighting off waves of nausea. Damn plane wasn’t heated properly. It was so cold that I could barely feel my left arm.

Our plane started to turn away. The plane ahead was almost over its final destination - Novaya Zemlya. Both of the planes were painted with special reflective paint to reduce heat damage from the hydrogen bomb. We were told that we had only a 50% chance of surviving the test. I tried to look at the faces of other crewmen and scientists aboard. They looked smudged, blurred. I blinked. Damn goggles must have fogged up again.

I saw the nuke being dropped from the plane ahead of us - a small black dot appeared in the air and an enormous, white parachute bloomed over it. The 27-tonne angel of the apocalypse began its descent to purify the frozen earth below it with its spell of absolute, unstoppable destruction.

Commissar Sasha clapped his hands excitedly. Everyone straightened up, I physically felt the tension fill the air. This was it. The bomb to end all bombs - the trump card of the USSR.

Both of the planes sharply turned away. We had to get forty five kilometers away from the explosion.

A large, mechanical clock on the wall showed the numbers 11:32 on its steel-plated display. I looked at the clock. The numbers didn’t change at all as time passed. I squinted at it. Did the clock break down?

The world flashed. I clawed into the seat with all of my strength, expecting the blast wave to reach us soon. The moment of waiting felt like an eternity. The plane suddenly shook with a powerful jolt, turning in the air sideways, catastrophically spinning out of control. The other technicians yelled. Equipment swung to the side, then up and then down. My stomach dropped as gravity let go. The pilots swore as they desperately tried to keep us in the air.

The plane slowly righted itself out.

In a minute I exhaled. We were safe. We survived. I looked at the porthole and choked.

It was there.

The blast wave had torn the clouds apart, pushed them away like a giant hand of God. An ocean of light and fire spread out beneath us. An enormous, orange sphere was growing in the view, like an alien planet, like a new sun. It grew and grew without stopping, becoming bigger and bigger. It looked like the damn thing wouldn't stop growing, that it would consume, devour the entire Earth. The specter of death we had unleashed was unreal, supernatural, truly mind boggling.

The fireball reached nearly ten kilometers in diameter before it fell apart. A truly monstrous mushroom cloud formed in its place.

I glanced at the equipment. The bhangmeter results and other data suggested the bomb yielded around 58 megatons!

The mushroom cloud reached its apex, seven times the height of Mount Everest, blossoming high above the stratosphere and well inside the mesosphere. The cap of the mushroom cloud had a peak width of 95 km and its base was 40 km wide.

I swallowed nervously.

The commissar's smile grew wide. “Incredible. Truly incredible…” He whispered.

The mushroom cloud didn’t seem to be coming apart. It remained in place, suspended, imprinted onto the world. I looked back at the clock.

[11:32]

Argh. I turned my head to look at another, smaller clock.

[11:32]

What?! I looked down at my metal wristwatch. The Vostok wristwatch was a graduation gift from professor Lebedev. I wound it regularly myself every morning and it had never failed me in four years of...

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[11:32]

My mind clicked. This wasn't real. None of it was real!

This was a dream. Just another dream! Of course!

“I have to wake up,” I croaked, trying to tear myself away from the nightmarish vision of the eternal explosion, trying to jolt myself awake. The view wobbled slightly but didn’t fade away.

“Tut, tut.” Commissar Gradenski shook his head. “Let me enjoy this, Slava.”

My head snapped back in his direction. He was clear, distinct. Not fuzzy like the others.

“Who are you?” I shouted, noticing that the deafening thrum of the engines was gone as if it was simply cut away like a soundtrack removed from a film.

Sasha simply smiled back at me, his face shimmering with unearthly, pale tones cast by the vast suspended explosion. My skin started to crawl as the commissar's smile grew wider and wider.

I yelped, retreating away from him.

One of the pilots suddenly became clear, animated. Silver hair and silver-blue eyes flashed into existence. She released the belts and stood out of her leather chair and stepped to my side. Delta was here, and had invaded my dream through the Astral Ocean just as she did before!

Commissar Gradenski didn’t seem concerned. He simply looked her over and nodded as if he was expecting her, as if this was just a tea party where the last member had just shown up.

“What is he?” I whispered to my twin, my teeth chattering.

“She,” Delta hissed, her hands breaking up into a hundred silver blades, protectively standing in front of me. “Get out of his head, Phantom!”

A dreadful, horrid answer suddenly clicked in my head. The Phantom-Squid. The monster from the forest with a hollow shell full of its children on its back.

Hollow Mother.

It was somehow inside of my head, learning from me, studying my dreams, pretending to be Sasha Gradenski.

How? Why? To what end? For how long has she been invading my dreams?

Sasha shimmered, his form lengthening, becoming pale… skin melting away to reveal something grotesque and horrifying like a bubble of living mercury. Hundreds of extra eyes sprouted on his… on its ballooning head now shaped like a silver, circular, hollow diatom.

“What do you want?!” I demanded, staring at the ghastly aberration.

Numbing, frigid chill started to creep up my arm.

Delta turned to me. “Don’t talk to her! Don't look at her! Slava! Wake up! Wake up now!”

One of her silver blades struck me in the head and the phantom and the view of the detonation of Tzar Bomba fell apart into shreds, folded away as if they never existed.

I awoke with a gasp, covered in sweat. My left arm felt unnaturally cold, as if I kept it in a freezer for ten minutes.

“Damn, damn, damn!” Delta yelled, her Phantom body flashing around me, shining threads stabbing at my arm.

“W-what the devil was that?” I whimpered, blinking.

“She's somehow tethered to your body and soul,” Delta hissed, slowly stopping her prodding of my arm. “I can’t break the connection. I can barely see where it is. She must have nipped you… some time ago. Her level is too high... I’m sorry!”

I activated my Infoscopes and scanned myself. Nothing. There was technically nothing wrong with me... other than the fact that I was an Astral Phantom.

“As if we don’t have enough to worry about,” I sighed. “What do you think she wants? Why is she in my dreams as a... KGB agent?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Delta sighed. “Maybe she’s trying to figure out how to control you better. Maybe she’s learning about humanity so that she can find out our weaknesses. Regardless… of what she wants, the connection is clearly growing stronger.”

I frowned, rubbing my left arm. We were inside of our tent. A hex-lantern hanging from the ceiling lit the mesh-brown walls with a yellow-orange glow. I glanced at the magitek artifact. The damn thing was supposed to keep phantoms away! Why couldn't it keep Sasha out of my head? Useless magic lamp!

I opened the tent flap and crawled outside, rubbing my face. It was morning. The flowers and grass around the tree were covered with droplets of water that sparkled in the sunlight.

I looked ahead, through the wide breach in the tower's thick wall.

The sun was slowly rising above the Valley of Death, painting the malignant mists pink. As I squinted at the clouds, I felt like I could almost discern some kind of ruined, desolate, sizable structures within it. Perhaps it was just an illusion.

“What else do you think is down there?” Delta asked.

“Death,” I replied. “The levels of magrad in the center must be off the charts, if I had charts to define mana radiance that is. Just the trace amounts of lethal chemicals emanating from those clouds told me that the air is incompatible with breathing down there.”

"Peachy," she said.

“What do you think Sasha wants from me?” I mulled.

“Do not call her that!” She hissed. “Do not assign her a personality!”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because she’s not a god-damned person! I’ve seen her eat the souls of people, Slava! She is not our friend!”

“Right,” I muttered.

“She is not a person! She’s a demon, a fiend incarnate! I’m sure that if she had the capability she would try to build hydrogen-bomb weapons from Earth, split atoms to shatter the barrier between the Astral and the physical even further!”

“Okay, okay,” I raised my hands. “We won’t rely on Phantom-Sasha…”

“What did I just say?” Delta advanced on me with a grim look. “Do you think this is a game? Do you think that it was fun for me to be down there, constantly getting chased by her children while I searched for you?”

I shook my head. “I don’t and I… I’m sorry… but...”

This was one of the social situations that I usually fumbled up completely.

“Look, we need to call her something! We can’t keep calling her 'Mother'. That just seems like we're playing on her terms,” I tried to defend my point.

“I guess,” Delta’s anger fell apart. She turned away from me and looked at the sunrise.

In a few minutes, she turned to me once again.

Through the view of my Infoscopes, I saw her Phantom form transposed over her human body, Astral Hunter blades flickering through the air with blue and violet shimmers.

Her pupils looked like upside down pyramids, it was... a bit odd.

She started to hum and her illusory threads vibrated in the Astral to produce the Song of the Alanian Sentinel.

With each tone of the Sentinel’s song that danced across the entire Alanian tower, echoed back to us by the Mystic tree and the Hex-beacon I felt marginally calmer, slightly more focused.

There was a lot to be done today.

I hung the lantern on my belt and put the empty backpack on my back.

“Where’s Kliss?” I asked.

“Sleeping,” Delta said. “At our parents' house. She was trying to make friends with our dad, I think.”

“How’d that go?”

“Poorly,” she shrugged.

“I see,” I said. "We'll sort it out when we head home then."